Teacher Effectiveness
To make dramatic improvements in all students’ preparation for college and careers, states need thoughtful, intentional human capital strategies that get the right teachers in the right places in the right subjects. The need is especially acute in states that have or plan to adopt college‐ and career‐ready academic standards and graduation requirements: they will need highly effective teachers – particularly in upper‐level mathematics and science courses – capable of teaching rigorous content to all students. State policymakers are well aware that the quality of teaching is the most critical school‐based factor contributing to student learning, especially for low‐income and minority students. 1 The Race to the Top criteria accordingly encourage states to adopt policies to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers and leaders use those measures to inform a range of human capital systems and decisions, ensure an equitable distribution of effective teachers and leaders, and provide high‐quality support for educators and principals (see Table 1). If enacted, all of these policies could help a state advance its college and career readiness agenda, since that agenda will require higher and higher levels of teaching quality in order to succeed. But meeting these criteria presents special challenges in the college and career readiness context, especially when it comes to identifying, developing and deploying effective teachers at the high school level. The challenge is particularly great in high school mathematics and science, where research suggests that subject matter expertise is vital for effective teaching. 2 The following two sections focus on those special challenges. The first explores what states need to consider in meeting the Race to the Top’s teacher effectiveness criteria at the high school level if they are committed to a college‐ and career‐ready agenda. The second asks how states can go beyond RTTT to provide effective instruction in rigorous content to all students, regardless of where they go to school. While the Race to the Top criteria also encourage states to focus on improving leadership, the focus here is on high school teachers because of the specific issues teacher effectiveness poses for the college‐ and career‐ready agenda.
Meeting the Race to the Top Challenge: Effective High School Teachers Measuring Effectiveness. A central tenet of the Race to the Top criteria is that states need viable approaches to measure the effectiveness of teachers, provide an effectiveness rating to each individual teacher, and use those ratings to inform professional development, compensation, promotion, tenure, and dismissal. A state’s measure must include multiple inputs, but must include “student growth.” Even without Race to the Top criteria, experts and education leaders have increasingly come to see current teacher evaluation methods as inadequate, largely because they fail to differentiate between teachers with varying levels of effectiveness. 3 Utilizing data about student growth as part of teacher performance measurement presents technical and political challenges even at the elementary and middle school levels, where states increasingly have This guide is one of a series of papers Achieve has prepared to help states maximize the opportunities presented through the Race to the Top Fund (RTTT). In accompanying papers, Achieve addresses recommendations for leveraging high‐quality standards and assessments, strengthening P‐20 longitudinal data systems, and turning around low performing schools. Taken together, these papers offer advice to help state leaders develop comprehensive RTTT reform strategies firmly anchored in the goal of college and career readiness for all students. The full set of RTTT papers is available at http://www.achieve.org/RacetotheTop.